A wobbly start, but eventually Martin—like the complex woman he's conjured—finds his way.
The fifth novel from Martin, based on a real crime in small-town Illinois in 1952, begins with the on-campus murder of Jean De Belle on the first day of her first job as a high school librarian.
Jean has come to town after breaking her engagement and severing ties with hard-drinking salesman Charlie Camplain. She’s moved into an upstairs room in the home of a student and her mother, a widowed English teacher whose affection for her protégé and lodger strikes some in town as suspicious. The book’s first hundred pages, which detail Charlie’s clamorous arrival in town to win Jean back, the crime, and his capture, are a bit flat and desultory, but Martin gains his footing at the novel’s midpoint, where the book's impelling force changes from plot to psychology and where its focus turns to the crime’s beautifully mapped aftershocks. We follow the lonely, lovelorn middle-aged hotel clerk who summoned a cab for Charlie and noticed his gun; the toothless, good-natured cab driver who ended up playing a pivotal role in his capture; the high school boy pressed into service as an unwitting getaway driver on what was already the worst day of his life; that boy's estranged and anguished girlfriend, Robbie McVeigh; and the novel’s moral center and best element, Robbie's mother, Mary Ellen, the landlady, confidante, and accused lover of Miss De Belle, who stubbornly refuses to defend herself or to submit to the binary "Is she or isn't she?" thinking that the school board and fellow townspeople demand of her. In the end, Martin creates a subtle and intricate portrait of small-town mores and of the after echoes and reverberations, for those who've witnessed it, of sudden, shocking violence.
A wobbly start, but eventually Martin—like the complex woman he's conjured—finds his way.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950539-14-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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